Postgraduate - UnitFIT5136 - Software engineering

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2014 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

Synopsis

This unit provides an introduction to the discipline of software engineering at the postgraduate level. The emphasis is upon a broad coverage of various aspects of software engineering. We assume the students will at this stage have adequate programming skills and are able to put theories to practice. The notion of a software system as a model or approximation of a desired system is introduced, and used as a way of describing such things as the software life cycle and its various models, programming by contract, design and testing issues, maintenance, reuse, complexity, divide and conquer strategies, metrics and measurement, project management and software legacy.

Outcomes

On successful completion of this unit students should be able to:

describe the breadth and nature of the discipline of software engineering;

explain the effect and implications of complexity in large software systems;

describe the issues in constructing large software systems from its components, and the nature and design of these components;

use basic modelling techniques to define and describe the behaviour of software systems;